


Colours

by tsunkiku



Category: Original Work
Genre: Not Beta Read, Original Character Death(s), Original Character(s), Original Fiction, Post-Apocalypse, This is pretty bleak sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-15
Updated: 2017-08-15
Packaged: 2018-12-15 12:57:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11806452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tsunkiku/pseuds/tsunkiku
Summary: Though no one alive had known the world before, sometimes people spoke of it, remembering as if they did. Anya struggled to picture that world in her head, despite any pictures that remained to aid in the imagery. Pale beaming faces peered out from the folds of an old travel catalogue, dressed neatly in yellow cotton.Sometimes, she looked at them and wondered if they had been alive when everything went to shit. What had they thought about it? Had they thought the war was worth it? Had they cowered and cried when the bombs lit up the sky? Had they lived until the dawn?





	Colours

Anya had taken the trip up to the highest tower block so many times that she had lost count around two hundred-and-thirty-five. 

Access from the 'subs was easier in theory than it was in practise. 

First, you found yourself the third exit by main-street west, ascended the twisting metal spines of long dead escalators; follow the route upwards, and eventually you reached the old station hall; ancient marble, scattered debris from the caved in roof lying fallen and dormant like the bodies of birds. The path there was easy to follow, since the footprints of a thousand travellers before you were carved into the dust. The door to the outside world was a crack in the wall that gaped like a wound, and today when Anya passed through it, she could see spores suspended in the light like a mist, almost beautiful.

From there, the tower was only a short walk north; two streets through a gauntlet of broken buildings bowing inward, vegetation draping from the concrete like funeral shrouds. The tower itself was less decrepit. In fact, it was the only building for a long distance, which Anya knew of, that still stood tall and strong and unbent by calamity and time. Most of the other skyscrapers that had once barred the city's skyline had crumbled long ago, but the tower block remained, the ageless trunk of an ancient plant sprouting from debris.

The first time Anya had ever taken this trip, it had been with Eli at her side. He had told her - recounting as always in the calm, gentle way he explained anything to Anya - that despite it's significance now, it had once just been another boring feature of the abandoned city that had always groaned above her. Nothing of any special importance, no landmark of note. There had been taller buildings; offices of greater import.

At the front desk, the names of the companies that had rented the space were nothing but faded symbols to Anya, hieroglyphics of a language she did not understand. Sometimes, she would trace her finger along the path of the words, and feel a spark in her gut that she wanted to believe was some kind of transcendent memory that still lingered in the ghosts of the people who had once inhabited this place, and known it like home. 

It wasn't like home to anyone, anymore, and never would be again, but Anya still knew it like the hands of an old friend.

Windows were smashed, large sections of wall yawn opened in gap toothed wails, foundation and floor crumbling into dust. Though the tower still seemed to stand strong, within it’s guts rotted. Furniture and broken remnants of technology were scattered throughout the empty rooms, relics suspended in time, lonely and abandoned like forgotten dolls. 

There was only floor that still remained close to pristine, but Eli warned her to never go there, and so dutifully she didn't. Apparently, and everyone knew said so, the computers would turn themselves despite the power being long since cut; the drawers on the desks would open and close with no hand or draft nearby to disturb them; chairs would spin across the carpeted floor unprompted, and worst of all, comms were disturbed to the point of non-function. There were a hundred other awful tales steeped in a pantomime sense of dread, a new one emerging every time someone spoke about it. Anya didn’t know if she believed it herself, but if Eli was afraid of something, Anya was wise enough to fear it too.

He had never once lied to her.

Anya had grown up, like everyone else, in the rivering tunnels of subway that still snaked in the earth below the broken city, where the remaining population now lived and sometimes died. Anya's world had been one of concrete, sombre crowds and inky darkness; gas lamps and scraps of cured meat, old magazines pilfered from the stations above with pages fraying and colour fading. Though no one alive had known the world before, sometimes people spoke of it, remembering as if they did. Anya struggled to picture that world in her head, despite any pictures that remained to aid in the imagery. Pale beaming faces peered out from the folds of an old travel catalogue, dressed neatly in yellow cotton. 

Sometimes, she looked at them and wondered if they had been alive when everything went to shit. What had they thought about it? Had they thought the war was worth it? Had they cowered and cried when the bombs lit up the sky? Had they lived until the dawn?

These and other questions Anya had tried to ask Eli, once, but he had never answered, only shrugged and continued with whatever task currently occupied him. Truthfully, Anya never minded, since watching Eli work was fascinating. Long fingered, dextrous hands that always seemed so certain of themselves, never hesitating. Burn scars bloomed pale over the dark skin like mists of morning air. The women who pursued Eli always cooed over his hair, silky and long and perfectly black, but it was his hands and his eyes which Anya liked best. Yellow, like a cat, they were the part of him which changed Eli's stoic face from waxwork into a living, seething creature. Like the fluttering edge of a flame, his stare felt hot to the touch. 

Eli was the one to teach Anya how to use a gun. His hands had been larger then, or maybe Anya's had been smaller, but they had encased hers easily, his low voice muttering gently as he guided her aim upwards. 

"Both eyes open," he'd said, nodding towards the target, a can already ruined hollow by past bullets, "Keeping one eye shut is for the movies; aesthetic."

"What's a movie? And what's 'aesthetic'?"  
"Nevermind. Just shoot."   
She didn't, and she did. 

He had been there too, when Anya had buried her mother. 

It took hours to drag her heavy body, wrapped carefully in old tarpaulin, up to the surface. She didn't want to just burn her in some lonely, dark tunnel, and hope that her soul might escape past the slime and the spiderwebs to somewhere better. She wanted her to be underneath the sky. She had always been afraid of it, and in turn afraid of Anya, always fretting over her excursions there. ‘The air, Anya’, she’d said, ‘I don’t want you breathing all that bad air. It’s toxic, you know. You can feel it on your skin like a sweater’. Anya ha brushed her worries away as nothing at first, an overprotective parent with nothing else to do but be afraid for her daughter. 

Now she was dead, though, and there was nothing for her to fear anymore. 

It took several hours more to dig the hole, scraping at a patch of rotten earth that crumbled sickly white between their fingers as they clawed at it. Anya would never forget the sound her mother’s body had made – the heavy, hollow thump, the crackle of plastic, the silence – when Eli had shoved it into the pit. 

She couldn’t remember crying, but she could remember Eli’s hand on her shoulder, the weight of it, how it had squeezed at her through jacket and sweater and shirt and vest and skin and muscle until she had felt him in her bones. 

“What am I going to do?” Some little girl’s voice she didn’t recognise anymore had spoken, a songbird’s pale cry. Her cheeks were wet. “Where am I going to go?”

“Back,” Eli had sounded so certain. He always sounded certain, but especially then. His voice had trembled with it. “Back home with me.”

With nothing else left, Eli became the rest of the world. 

Their group, smaller as they grew each year, survived thusly: scavenging technology and metals from the world above, hunting, canned and dried food they hoarded like gems, and stealing. It was a hard life, but it was the only one she knew, and Anya liked to keep herself busy. Eli took charge of the procurement of resources, and for this he was admired like a leader, even if he would never really act like it. He smiled too much. Not huge, teeth splitting grins like Robert, nor the slow cat smirks you learned to ignore from Emma. He just smiled. They were small and gentle and Anya cradled every single one she earned in her palms like a newborn bird, cherishing it. 

Today, Anya had been put on watch duty, and that had meant the Tower. Her ascent had finally taken her, at last, to the top. Up here, the air felt lighter, felt cleaner. Maybe the gusts billowed all of the poison away. 

Or maybe it really was a different world.

Through the murky visor of her gasmask, Anya turned her gaze towards the heavens, her upturned face an offering. It was a beautiful, vibrant, living thing. The clouds pulsed, a distant black storm throbbing on the horizon like a bruise. The sunrise was splattered around the edges, dripping down to the edge of the world, spilled blood. It the centre of the cacophony was the sun itself, the goddess of this now empty universe. Sometimes, Anya would count the colours as she watched them shift and change, draining slowly as the night sapped the life from the day. The world below was grey and black and dead, anaemic, starving, and Anya stared up at the sky now, filled with a hunger that stung in her chest. 

The sunset seemed so close that as felt as though she could reach out her hand and let the brilliance burn through her fingertips.

The violence of a sudden noise tore her jarringly from her reverie. What the fuck? It had almost sounded like an explosion. Almost like gunfire. That couldn’t be right. 

Crawling on all fours, Anya shuffled cautiously towards the edge, peering down through the murk at the streets below. She saw what she expected to see, for the most part; the empty bones of the city, lying dormant and fossilising. A whole lot of nothing. Her gaze swept westward, and with a jolt that felt like physical pain her heart sank at the sight of dust rising like a cloud, disturbed. She couldn’t see figures, not from this angle, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there, just hidden. Eli and the others were down there, searching, she knew. Had something happened? 

Fumbling in her satchel, Anya retrieved the small grey device they called their comms, gloved fingers clumsy as she jabbed at the buttons. Her breath was coiled tight in her chest, every new heave of her lungs squeezing tighter.

“Eli. What’s going on? Eli?”

Nothing. 

Anya’s brow furrowed. This wasn’t usual. Eli always responded immediately, even if it was only a word. Frowning, she tried again, pressing the speaker as close to the mask’s mouthpiece as she could, plastic against plastic. 

“Eli. What is-“

“Anya,” Eli’s voice. There was a catch in it Anya didn’t recognise, but for some reason she couldn’t thumb down it made her heart strain at the seams. There were noises in the background, sounds she recognised but told herself she didn’t. Muffled peppering of gunfire, laboured breathing of a dying man. Eli, afraid. 

“Eli, what the fuck is happening, where are you, I’m coming!“

“No. Stay there. Don’t move. I’ll come find you, just-” His voice was shredded at once by the crash of another explosion, closer this time, and Anya could swear she felt the building shake. The sweat on her back was cold. She waited a heartbeat or two for Eli to finish his sentence, to tell her what to do, to guide her. Eli, who always knew to do the right thing. Eli, who was kind and clever and striking as the world around him became a cruel dull mess.

“Eli? Eli, can you answer me?” Emptiness, it pressed in all sides. Every muscle felt as though it had turned to lead. “Eli?”

Anya couldn’t say why she did it. Her hands didn’t feel like her own as her fingers clawed at the straps on her mask, desperate in her abandon. Maybe her voice wasn’t clear enough. Maybe it was muffled. Maybe she just had to scream louder. Maybe, maybe, just for a second. Eli would have done it for her. 

Eli. 

“Eli!” Had the world always been so quiet? Anya’s voice sounded strange, she realised, Up There, without the mask to shroud her face. “Eli! Answer me! Eli! God, please, just-“

Static answered. Above her, the sky bled. 

“Eli.”

Her first choke was a sob.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! 
> 
> some more original work. this one I actually first wrote several years ago but I have reworked it. None of the characters are particularly fleshed out in my mind, this is a true one-shot. I can explain context to anyone who wants to know more, though. This isn't my best by far but I still welcome constructive criticism as always. This has not been beta read so please excuse the occasional typing error.
> 
> I promise that I haven't abandoned 'flowers' and I'll get back to working on it when I am. I am struggling a huge amount mentally right now and I feel under pressure to write as well as I've done in previous chapters. I've thrown out about 20k worth of first drafts, but I will get there eventually. The next chapter also features some content which is very emotionally taxing for me to write. However, I have pre-written a lot of future content. Please bear with me. 
> 
> If you enjoyed my original work please come and find me on tumblr or discord (info on my profile). Thanks!


End file.
